Cao 1
Zach. C
Ms. Hughes
English 10 – Block 3
26 September 2024
Guilt, the powerful emotion that all of us feel at one point or another, that sad sensation
that tears you apart piece by piece. The gut-wrenching feeling that brings you to your knees,
overwhelmed with emotion. There are a multitude of ways that authors can convey these
powerful emotions, such as through dialogue, comparisons like analogies and metaphors, or
through other literary devices for instance metaphors, flashbacks, or conflicts. In his story
Ambush, Tim O’Brien uses conflicts, more specifically internal ones to convey feelings of guilt,
shock, and others throughout the story. He additionally utilizes flashbacks to provide the
audience with a better understanding of the events that happened to him. Finally, O’Brien
incorporates symbolism to represent the unknown and uncertainty of the events of the story. With
these elements, Tim O’Brien is able to articulate the overwhelming and harrowing emotion of
guilt and how connects to the story’s underlying theme.
In the story “Ambush”, Tim O’Brien utilizes internal conflicts to convey the theme “the
guilt of killing never goes away.” Firstly, O’Brien is home with his daughter, and she asks him
about the war and why he writes war stories. “She said, “so I guess you must’ve killed
somebody.” With O’Brien saying that “It was a difficult moment” and doing “what he seemed
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right which was to say, “Of course not…”. Showing that O’Brien wants to tell his daughter about
his actions, but he doesn’t want to tell her, so he lies to her. This connects to the theme because
the quote shows the internal conflict with himself over his guilt of killing the man. Towards the
middle of the story, O’Brien goes into detail about the aftermath of the killing, where his friend
Kiowa tries to tell him that “The man would’ve died anyway… that it was a good kill, that (he)
was a soldier, and this was a war… that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what
the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed” (O’Brien Paragraph 7). O’Brien didn’t
listen to him and stood still gaping “at the fact of the young man’s body.” Revealing Tim’s
conflict with himself and Kiowa as he tries to shake his guilt and shock, but Tim can’t move on,
displaying Tim O’Brien’s use of internal conflict and how it connects to the theme. At the end of
the story, Tim is back home, explaining what happened after the war and how “even now [he]
hasn’t finished sorting it out.” And how “Sometimes [he] forgives [himself], other times [he]
doesn’t.” O’Brien shows that even after all the time that has passed, he can’t get over the guilt of
how he killed the man, supporting the idea that O’Brien uses internal conflicts to convey the
theme. In conclusion, these 3 statements show how Tim O’Brien employs internal conflicts to get
the underlying theme of “the guilt of killing never goes away” across to the reader.
Killing is a sinful action, one that brings different feelings upon enacting it. You could
feel anger, sadness, even satisfaction. But no feeling more common than guilt, the emotion that
drags you down like an anchor, pinning you to where you stand. You might find yourself
thinking things like “I had to do this” or “I didn’t mean it”. These were the exact things Tim
O’Brien found himself thinking after he killed the man in the jungle. Throughout the story
Ambush, O’Brien’s internal conflicts with guilt are put on full display as he delves into his
thoughts during the incident. We are there as he pulls the pin on the grenade and throws it. We
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are there as he fights himself, telling himself he was doing his duty. We are there as years later,
O’Brien continues to get over his guilt of killing the man. These events all offer immense insight
into Tim O’Brien’s guilt after the ordeal and are even better examples that show how O’Brien
can never move on, never wash away the remorse of his actions leading back to the core theme
of how “the guilt of killing never goes away.”